Bob

Tuesday, April 18, 2017

It Really Is the Racism... Seriously, You Guys...

Moving from the 50th to the 75th percentile in the authoritarian scale made someone about 3 percent more likely to vote for Trump. The same jump on the SRS scale made someone 20 percent more likely to vote for Trump.

This data can be compared to previous elections going back to 1988. What’s surprising isn’t that Trump voters are more racist than Clinton voters, because the same finding is there for people who voted for Romney, McCain, Dole and the two Bushes. In fact, on three of the four questions that test racial attitudes, Trump’s voters were less racist than their Republican predecessors (the fourth question was a tie).

The big difference is among Democrats, or Hillary Clinton voters, who are far less racist in their attitudes than the Democrats who voted in any recent election, including the two for Barack Obama. The implications are bizarre, suggesting that a lot of racially bigoted people were willing to vote for Obama against an opponent who didn’t appeal too directly to their racism, but who flocked to Trump when he made “political incorrectness” central to his pitch. To be explicit here, a lot of racist Democrats voted for Obama and didn’t vote for Clinton, and they did it because of racism.

This suggests that if you want a racist’s vote, you have to make an appeal directly to their racism. Without it, he or she just might vote for the racial minority.

I don't know if it's the racist appeal... the Republicans are doing it all the time, even if it's at a lower decibel level than most of us can hear. But at the very least, it took an economic collapse that undeniably happened on the Republicans' watch in 2008 to make the "Reagan Republicans" overlook their racism enough to vote for the black guy. By 2012, Obama's margin was cut in half.

I know the polls show now that Obama would've beaten Trump, but Obama never had to run against the FBI and the Russians.